Nine Swedish women received transplanted wombs

Sweden doctors have successfully transplanted wombs into nine women which was donated from relatives and will soon try to become pregnant, the doctor incharge of the pioneering project has told.

The said women were born without a uterus or had it removed because of cervical cancer. Most are in the age of 30s and are part of the first major experiment to test whether it’s feasible to transplant wombs into women so they can give birth to their own children.

Transplants of life saving organs such as hearts, livers and kidneys have been done for decades and doctors are increasingly transplanting hands, faces and other body parts to improve patients’ quality of life. The Womb transplants the first ones future to be temporary, just to allow childbearing push that frontier even farther and raise some new concerns.

There have been two earlier attempts to transplant a womb --- in Turkey and Saudi Arabia ---but both failed to get results. Scientists in Britain, Hungary and elsewhere are also planning alike operations but the hard work in Sweden are the most advanced. 

Dr Mats Brannstrom said, “This is a new type of surgery”. “We have no text to look at.”

Dr Mats, chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department at the University of Gothenburg, is leading the project. Next month, he and colleagues will run the first-ever seminar on how to perform womb transplants and they plan to publish a scientific report on their works soon.

Some professionals have raised concerns about whether it’s ethical to use live donors for a trial procedure that doesn’t save lives. But John Harris, a bioethics professional at the University of Manchester, didn’t see a difficulty with that as long as donors are fully informed. He said donating kidneys is not essentially life-saving, yet is widely promoted.

“Dialysis is available for this, but we have come to accept and to even give confidence to people to take risks to donate a kidney,” Harris said.

Dr Mats said the nine womb recipients are doing well. Many before now had their periods six weeks after the transplants, an early sign that the wombs are healthy and functioning well. One woman had an infection in her recently received uterus and others had some minor rejection episodes, but none of the recipients or donors required intensive care after the surgery, Dr Mats said. All left the hospital within days.

The womb transplants have ignited wish among women unable to have children because they lost a uterus to cancer or were born without uterus. About one in girl in 4,500 is born with a disease, known as MRKH, where she doesn't have a womb.

Fertility professionals have hailed the project as important but stress it’s unknown whether the transplants will result in healthy children.